N.T.

Wright: The Bible Does Answer the

ProblemHeres How posted by admin
Thanks, Bart, for a further characteristic (and as you say forceful) response and fresh statement.
Youve taken a few more words this time (Im delighted to see) and I will happily do the same.
Let me begin by trying to clarify the first two matters which you picked up. Ill take them in
reverse order for a reason which may become clear.
I wasnt suggesting you left the faith because you had an intellectualized understanding of it. I
was wondering whether the argument of your book there is so much suffering, the Bible
doesnt explain it satisfactorily, I cant reconcile it with a good and powerful God was the
reason you left the faith, or if not, what was the reason, and how that reason relates to the
argument of the book.

From what you now say it sounds to me as though you are saying you used to have a relationship
with God through Jesus Christ and now you dont, and that the argument about suffering has as it
were reinforced that sense of something that no longer works for you. (Or are you saying the
argument precipitated the loss of the relationship? You say that perhaps you left for good
reasons were these the reasons in the book? If so, how does that differ from an intellectual
argument which reaches a conclusion?) Im certainly not trying to put words into your mouth or
ideas into your head I am (I trust) too experienced a pastor to suppose I can psychoanalyze
even someone who is sitting in the same room and co-operating! but simply to be sure Ive
heard what you are saying. You do after all talk quite a bit, in the book and in your first posting,
about your loss of faith, and I was wanting to be sure I heard what you were saying and how that
loss related to the argument about suffering.

This was why (your first point, my second) I was wondering about the force that is added to the
case your book is making (or a sudden thought was your book not after all making a case,
but rather expressing an emotion?) by spending, say, twenty pages describing the Holocaust in
detail rather than summarizing it in one or two. Im still trying to get a handle on the relation
between the rhetorical strategy of your book (rubbing your readers noses in great detail about
the horrors of the world) and the actual substance of the case youre making. I am not at all
saying that numbers dont matter or wanting to reduce things to cold logic . . .
So to the more substantial points. I think we differ on what might be meant by the biblical view
of suffering. That phrase is, it now appears, quite ambiguous. You are trying to get at what the
Bible says about why suffering happens. I argued in my book that the Bible doesnt actually
give us much of an answer to that question why, to put it sharply, there was a snake in Eden in
the first place and that the biblical view of suffering is more about what the creator God is
doing about it and/or with it. We may thus in fact be talking more at cross purposes than I had

realised.
In other words, I dont think (for instance) that Amos and the others were writing in order to
address the problem of theodicy (Why are these bad things happening? Its because youve been
wicked!) but to say, Israel YHWH has called you to be his holy people, and if you fail at that
point, the world is out of joint, and youll discover what that means! In other words, the
prophets were not, by and large, answering our philosophical question, but acting (so they seem
to have believed) as mouthpieces for the covenant God. Clearly Job (and Psalm 73 and some
other passages) are addressing the philosophical problem more directly, and I agree that the
answers there remain puzzling, though I think the real answers there are actually, Here are some
reasons why you wont ever be able fully to understand this in the present life. Yes, I puzzle
about the ending of Job, but my strategy for puzzling is different from yours, I think. (See my
book Scripture and the Authority of God, published in the USA under the wondrous title The
Last Word.)

Underneath a lot of this I resonate with a line from Bonhoeffer that has haunted me ever since I
heard it as a student: that the primal sin of humanity, as in Genesis 3, is to put the knowledge of
good and evil before the knowledge of God. This could just be a shrug of the shoulders (Who
am I to understand such mysteries?), but it could and I think should be something more and
richer: a recognition that the sort of creatures we are are never going to be in a position to set a
moral bar and insist that God if there is a creator God jump over it. It is like recognising that
the telescope I have, while very good at enabling me to see the moon, Jupiter, Saturn and other
glories, wont ever let me see a black hole, or several other things that the high-energy physicists
and astronomers tell me are there. The instrument in question my creaturely and innately
rebellious humanity cant pick up the full mysteries of God and the world. Of course, there is
continuity between Gods view of good and evil and ours, or it would be chaos come again. But
we are never in a position to judge God (if God there be). Thats not a pious platitude, but a
rather obvious ontological reality.
But the main thing that the Bible has to offer, I still believe and no, it isnt a canon within the
canon, but rather the narrative offered by the canon itself! is the call of Abraham as the one
through whom the problem of the human plight will be addressed and resolved, and the long
playing out of that call, and the story of Abrahams descendents, not as the explanation of why
there is evil, suffering etc., but as the story of what the creator is now doing about it. I then hold
the other themes within that, and I think that is a fair thing for a Jewish or Christian theologian to
do. I appreciate that you dont read the Bible like this, and thats a larger conversation we might
have some time. As I say, I think we need the big stories as well as the little details. And the
details including Amos, the Flood, Revelation are held within that larger narrative, not
isolated nuggets of philosophical statements (now Im going to explain what this suffering is
about).

As I say in the book, once God decides (with the call of Abraham) to work to address the
problem of evil through people who are part of the problem as well as part of the solution, there
is going to be an awful lot of messiness, which will reach its climax when God not only gets his
feet muddy with the mess of the world but his hands bloody with the nails of the world. (But of
course, I forgot: you dont think the NT, or its early parts, believes in the divinity of Jesus, do
you? I am genuinely puzzled by that. It seems abundantly clear in Paul, as I and plenty of others
have argued in various places.)
This isnt of course a full answer but a signpost in one direction. And, just as a nudge are you
sure Ecclesiastes doesnt think there is a future judgment in other words, a day of reckoning
when the creator will sort things out? How do you read those passages (3.17, 12.14) which seem
to say there is? And what do you do with the passages (e.g. 2.26, 5.6) where Ecclesiastes seems
to share what you see as the prophetic perspective, that God makes bad things happen to bad
people?
But the real dividing line, still and you still havent addressed it comes with the resurrection.
I do think, and I think the early Christians thought, and I think the evangelists (yes, in their
different ways) thought, that the kingdom did come through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Not come fully, of course; but, in the usual language, it was radically inaugurated. The myth of
the delay of the parousia has largely grown up in the modern world to fill the vacuum left when
scholars insisted that the resurrection didnt happen. For the early Christians, Gods new world
the world where Gods writ runs had already begun, and they were living in it by the power of
the Spirit. Things did change. The early Christians did make a difference. (See Rodney Starks
remarkable book on The Rise of Christianity.) Yes, of course, earthquakes and tsunamis still
happen. The NT writers knew that as well as we did, and they went on saying that Jesus was
already Lord, not simply that he would become that one day. They werent mostly offering,
either, an analysis of why evil/suffering happens, but they were implementing Jesus kingdomwork of challenging evil/suffering in the power of God not in a sudden all-powerful theocracy,
banishing every evil at a stroke, but in their continuing work on the model of Jesus himself and
his parables.
So if youre saying Im missing things out, I think you are too and rather important ones. Not
only the resurrection, but also (I return to this) Pauls massive exposition of Gods justice in
Romans. Romans is much, much bigger than how can sinners find a gracious God. Its how is
God seen to be righteous?, which is perhaps the closest, along with Job, that the Bible gets to a
direct address to your question. Interestingly, Paul insists that the answer passes through the
story of Abraham and, of course, the story of Jesus and particularly his death and resurrection. I
would love to know how you deal with that.
So, to answer your four propositions (noting as you say that propositions arent the sum and
substance of Christian faith!):

I dont think much of the Bible is actually addressing the question, Why is there suffering?, but
rather the question, What is God doing about it?. When cause-and-effect sequences do occur,
as in Amos etc., I read them within the prophetic call to Israel and the warnings, proper to
humans in general and covenant people in particular, about the consequences of not going with
the grain of the creators purposes. (If I say to my teenage son, The reason you came off the
road is that you were driving too fast round the corner, I am pointing out a cause-and-effect
sequence which he was apparently ignoring. Im not saying all your examples are like that but I
think some of them may be.)

If we insist on putting things the Bible says into a grid of our own questions, we will often find
apparent contradictions. (This, by the way, is part of my answer about the gospels, but that would
take a whole book to work out!) If I drive all round the perimeter of a big city, I will see several
quite different signs to the city centre. They will say different things, because I am in a different
place; but they are in fact all pointing to the same reality. Like all illustrations, that is of course
inadequate but it offers a warning against presuming contradiction where none exists. (Obvious
example: Pauls negative view of the law in Galatians and his positive view in Romans. Has
he changed his mind? No. It is we who have come to him with our question, Do you have a
positive or negative view of the law?. Paul, however, is wrestling with the complex story of
Gods people, not checking boxes in a C17 dogmatic textbook.)
I dont think the passages you refer to are meant as stand-alone answers to the question. Yes,
they raise natural problems which I have tried to address in my book, but it wont do just to say,
Well, that was a poor answer, and leave it at that.

Well, good that we can agree on this at least! And this is of course at quite a deep level why I left
the academy fifteen years ago and have tried, through energising the church more directly, to get
exactly this on the agenda. But it leads me to my final question to press a point I made in our
radio interview: Why, granted your view of the world, should we bother? Why not eat, drink
and be merry, for tomorrow we die, and thank our lucky stars that we can do so? The other side
of the coin of the problem of evil is, after all, the problem of good: if there is no God, no good
and wise creator, why is there an impulse to justice and mercy so deep within us? Why is there
beauty, love, laughter, friendship, joy? How do you then tell the difference between Ecclesiastes
and Sartre? The Bible of course has some answers to those questions. But Id be interested to
hear yours.
I guess this may be the end. But perhaps its only a semi-colon. Thanks for the dialogue and the
stimulus of debate. Frustrating to be so brief, but better than nothing. Thanks for putting up with
an incorrigible theologian.
Tom

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